Name: LÍLIAN LIMA GONÇALVES DOS PRAZERES

Publication date: 14/03/2019
Advisor:

Name	Role
ADELIA MARIA MIGLIEVICH RIBEIRO	Advisor *

Examining board:

Name	Role
ADELIA MARIA MIGLIEVICH RIBEIRO	Advisor *
MARIA MIRTIS CASER	Internal Examiner *
PAULA REGINA SIEGA	Internal Alternate *

Summary: Luisa Valenzuela’s writting is fertile ground for literary criticism because it allows the
accomplishment of numerous studies on the themes and the aesthetic constructions that
permeate its production. This thesis chose as object of investigation the bodies, voices and
feelings of the feminine character present in the literature of Luisa Valenzuela. In this way,
the question that guided it was: how can Valenzuela's writing be an act of creation and
resistance in a historical time marked by the silencing imposed by "State terrorism" in
Argentina? The research had as objectives: to present the biography of the writer and to look
for possible connections with the construction of its characters that star the narratives of the
author in order to perceive the "structure of feelings", category of the literary critic Welsh,
Raymond Williams, that forged and in which a generation of female writers subjected to (self)
exile provoked by authoritarian political regimes in Latin America was forged, in the 1960s
and 1980s. Based on feminist literary theories and the postcolonial and decolonial
perspectives, the thesis attempted to problematize the South American writer's "place of
speech" in Spanish writing and the way in which her work participates, on the one hand, in
feminist literature and , on the other hand, the post-boom prose of political motivations in the
continent. Her literature was still seen as a engaged literature in the themes and discussions
that it raises, combining fiction with "testimonial content" (SELIGMANN-SILVA, 2003), and
making possible a critical-reflexive exercise about a time whose memory should not be
erased. The focus was on the book Cambio de Armas, composed of five stories, in which the
author, through female protagonists, fictionalizes the period of dictatorship and the
oppressions experienced by women inserted in the "coloniality of gender" (LUGONES,
2010), as an inflection of the debate on the "colonialities" brought by Aníbal Quijano (2013)
and other decolonial authors. The methodology used was a compilation of existing literary
criticism on the work of the writer in order to make the first dialogues. Aware that it is not
possible to fix labels for the author, it was possible to emphasize its confrontation by the
word of the repressive system through which Argentina passed and the peculiarity of its
artistic creation, like the experimental use of the language and the ways of narrate, in which
the different narrative focuses blend, as well as the reverberation of silenced feminine voices
and the accent on eroticism as a means of liberating women, in accordance with the
"structure of feelings" that the feminist revolution brought about. For the analysis, the postcolonial Gayatri Spivak (2012) and the poststructuralist Judith Butler (1998) were used, both
to deepen, in their own way, the “Micro-powers” by Michel Foucault (1979). The analyzed
stories showed the female body as a metaphor of the violated homeland under the yoke of
the Argentine State of Exception, which was also "masculine." The capacity of the
protagonists to recount their tragedies was, however, a way of resisting the condition of
subalternity/coloniality to which they were subjected. From a love affair to the experience of
political torture, "displacements" were possible and opened up the chances of changing
reality and confronting the patriarchal system. Thus, We certify that Valenzuela preserves, in
the lines and between lines of her fiction, the memory of the systems of oppression existing
in Argentina, which were also common to many other Latin American countries, through an
engaged literature committed to the feminine condition of her time.
Keywords: Luisa Valenzuela. Structures of Feeling. Memory. Feminism. Dictatorship.

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